Design político, pós-modernismo e ideologia: uma análise do discurso de Barbara Kruger

Abstract

This research aims to describe the ways in which the work of the american designer Barbara Kruger configures itself as a political agent, investigating historical-material processes in the fields of politics and design, how they relate to each other and investigating the contradiction between terms such as “political design” and “politicized design” in the specificity of late capitalism. We sought to undertake a theoretical, exploratory and interdisciplinary study in the fields of design, history, philosophy and politics and its methodological procedure uses the guidelines proposed by the philosopher Roland Barthes for the analysis of advertising images and the codes elaborated in his work “S/Z”. The five codes proposed by Barthes are: Hermeneutic Code, Proairetic Code, Semic Code, Symbolic Code and Cultural Code. A detailed reading of the corpus composed of ten posters by the designer during the 1980s offered us subsidies to identify the particularities of Kruger's work in perspective to political approaches to design, situating her work based on the phenomenon theorized by the marxist critic Fredric Jameson ( 1997) as postmodernism. Based on the results of the analysis, it was possible to conclude that Kruger's work is closely related to political militancy and the issues surrounding the discussions of the feminist movement. Furthermore, the analyzed corpus provided data connecting it to the cultural phenomenon of postmodernism. We conclude that it is possible to say that Kruger's work is politically engaged, presenting a pessimistic perspective on the North

American reality in the aforementioned decade. It reflects the defeat and impotence experienced by the US left, but refrains from presenting possibilities of escape and opportunities. Understanding “political design” as the construction of possible realities for collective experiences and subjectivization and “politicized design” as the exercise of design through subjective ideological conceptions, the research shows us that Barbara Kruger's work during the 1980s is configured as “politicized design”.